Brooklyn Bargain? First, Check the Cellar

Even if $260,000 was a steal by New York City standards in 2004, David Petersen found the 1,100-square-foot row house, on 18th Street near Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, stiflingly narrow at 13 feet 7 inches wide, with dim light and low ceilings. "The ceiling fan would have sliced off your head," he recalled, and the walls and floors sloped at odd angles. The home inspector's report jumped with exclamation points: "Bowed floors!" "Lead pipe to water supply!" "Roof in bad shape!" "Walls not plumb!"

But for an independent filmmaker with no full-time job and not much in the way of savings — living, as Mr. Petersen says artists do, "in a quaking state of fear" — home ownership was an irresistible lure. (Albeit one he had managed to avoid: "I thought only grown-ups owned anything," said Mr. Petersen, who turned 42 last month.)

Years of cobbling together budgets for his films, including "Fine Food, Fine Pastries, Open 6 to 9," about a bakery in Washington, which was nominated for an Oscar, and "If You Lived Here You Would Be Home Now," examining an artist's effect on a small town, for PBS, had prepared him for creative financing. He scraped together a 10 percent down payment and assumed a second mortgage for another 10 percent. A third loan from an online brokerage firm allowed him to hire his architect friends Anshu Bangia and William Agostinho, for what he estimated would be a $75,000 renovation.

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David Petersen began with a $260,000 fixer-upper purchased in 2004 and ended up with a new house.Credit
Michael Weschler for The New York Times

"I started with really low expectations," Mr. Petersen said. "I wanted level floors and a dry basement." But soon after construction began, he received a call from his next-door neighbor Vinny DeMarinis, a retired fireman who had grown up in Mr. Petersen's new house. "How much insurance have you got?" Mr. DeMarinis asked. "I got a hole in my wall the size of a Buick."

The house sat on an emotionally and architecturally close-knit block in a neighborhood called Greenwood Heights, Windsor Terrace or South Park Slope, depending on whom you asked. The block's modest mid-19th-century wood-frame houses, once home to Red Hook dockworkers and merchants serving wealthy Park Slope, now housed families that in many cases had been reared there. The structures crowded together on one side of the street, with the Prospect Expressway slicing along the other.

It turned out that the walls between the houses there were only five inches thick; banging on a wall in Mr. Petersen's house sent tremors down the street, and especially into Mr. DeMarinis's home. "Any work done in any house," Mr. DeMarinis said, "it's really a block activity." Each time he spoke with Mr. Petersen, he would greet him, "Dave, I'm sorry I ever met you."

There were more surprises. The foundation wasn't bad; it was nonexistent. The previous owner, Mr. DeMarinis's brother-in-law, had carved his own basement by digging below the house and carting out five-gallon buckets of dirt. The house was structurally unsalvageable.

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Mr. Petersen and
his girlfriend, Alex
Forman.Credit
Michael Weschler for The New York Times

Ms. Bangia and Mr. Agostinho found their charges reinvented, from traditional renovation to almost ground-up building: a complete transformation on a tight budget. "We had to rethink everything," Ms. Bangia said. The houses on either side "were leaning together like dominoes," she said. "We had to build a straight rectangle between two parallelograms — a house within a house."

Then Mr. Petersen's contractor disappeared with a deposit, and another, overwhelmed by the scale of the job, resigned. The third contractor was reliable, but charged more than the previous two. By this point, Mr. Petersen said, he was in a state of "grand mal fear: I was starting to spiral."

Having siphoned off some of his loan money to pay for a print of his film "Let the Church Say Amen," about a Washington storefront church, which was screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004, Mr. Petersen was approaching pennilessness, with the house nowhere near completion. He applied for a $75,000 line of credit through his film company, Beaufort 9 Films. He begged money from relatives, convincing his mother to mortgage her modest Takoma Park, Md., condo and nearly causing a familial rift. "I became like an addict," he said. "I tried to get money from everywhere." As renovation costs climbed to $390,000, he resorted to old-fashioned indie filmmaking methods: he used his credit cards.

Meanwhile, Ms. Bangia and Mr. Agostinho faced their own obstacles. To plumb the new walls, they had to lose width, squeezing the house to 12 feet 6 inches. Their main concern was infusing the narrow space with light — "otherwise it would feel like he'd be living in a shoebox," Ms. Bangia said. They settled on an open floor plan with no ornamentation and with a balcony overlooking the living area. Ms. Bangia calls the look "comfortable modern."

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Mr. Petersen and his girlfriend, Alex Forman, moved into the narrow row house with their dog, Ulysses, before the renovation was complete.Credit
Michael Weschler for The New York Times

For the exterior, the architects were concerned with respecting the context of the neighborhood and used slats of cedar siding, an updated version of the neighbors' vinyl. They added a third story with a 13-by-13-foot terrace, and inserted oversize 6-foot-8-inch windows on the street side. "We used laminated glass to protect against people throwing rocks," Ms. Bangia said. They weren't worried about vandals, but about the attention the highly reflective glass attracts at sunset.

To save money, they used maple plywood floors and Ikea cabinetry. Rather than add an income-generating apartment and lose the living room's double height, Mr. Petersen chose to add an extra bedroom with a private bath on the second floor, for occasional boarders.

But it would be a long while before he could rent out a room. Originally scheduled at six months, the renovation stretched out for more than 18. "Every minute that this was delaying, I was paying rent and paying this mortgage and the payment on the e-loan," he said. He and his girlfriend, Alex Forman, a photographer, moved in amid the chaos in August 2005.

"We'd wake up with plaster dust on our mouths and eyes, like it had snowed," Ms. Forman said. They slept outside on the terrace during the warm months. "Part of it felt like adventure and promising, and the other part was pure hell."

Photo

Credit
Michael Weschler for The New York Times

When construction finished in February of this year, Mr. Petersen invited 200 friends to press into the new space — 300 square feet larger than the original — for a housewarming party at which he and his band, Carpbrain, performed a musical version of his epic real estate journey called "Bob the Builder": "Alex the strong one/Loved her beau despite the plaster/Even when the neighbors warned her/That everyone called it Dave's disaster," goes one verse.

In the end, it was hardly a disaster. The bank reappraised the house at $1.25 million, allowing Mr. Petersen to take out one last loan, wipe out his $105,000 of credit card debt and lower his monthly payments to the $3,000 range (he has had to work a couple of full-time freelance jobs, as a television editor, to make them). "Suddenly I have this thing called equity," he said. "I have worth in the eyes of the bank"— and, in theory, a little more leverage when it comes to paying for his next film.

Relations along the block have warmed again. "We're neighbors, and all is forgiven," said Mr. DeMarinis, who plans to put his own house on the block later this summer. Mr. Petersen hopes his tale will instruct other artists in how to own a piece of New York City property (assuming they can find a $260,000 lot to start with).

But the house continues to throw curve balls, long after construction has ended. Just last month, Mr. Petersen decided to plant a Japanese garden in the backyard. "I started digging and I found a concrete patio below six inches of earth," he said. "I've been jackhammering all day."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page F6 of the New York edition with the headline: Brooklyn Bargain? First, Check the Cellar. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe